Why Hillary?

For the past few weeks the final pages of Newsweek have carried an increasingly annoying column written by Anna Quindlen. According to Ms Quindlen we should all support Hillary Clinton for president simply because she is a woman. While she has been known to throw in the occasional rational argument, her main point has been that America needs diversity in the White House. I don’t disagree that diversity is desirable in our leadership; I prefer competence over diversity any day. None of Ms. Quindlen’s articles have substantial critiques of Senator Clinton’s policies or voting record. This sort of decision making process is what led us to elect George Bush. When people elect whom they like rather than the best person for the job, the results speak for themselves. I would also assume that the women’s movement would prefer to have women promoted on their merits rather than on their sex. So far, I haven’t heard anything from the Clinton campaign that separates her from the rest of the presidential candidates.

Train Reading

An hour train commute provides me with some much needed time to catch up on some of my older issues of The Economist and I recently found two very informative articles on completely separate subjects. The first, “The World’s most Expensive Club”, provides a brief description of sovereign wealth funds. Published in the print edition of May 24^th, 2007 sovereign funds gained additional attention when China’s fund announced that it would be taking a $3 billion stake in the Blackstone private equity firm. The second article, “Moving Pieces” published on February 24, 2007, has a wonderful primer on tax havens for those of us with limited tax experience.